Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day016.13
Last-Modified: 2000/07/20
Q. And after the letter at the end of that line is a letter G?
. P-91
A. Yes.
Q. That indicates the file
only has a secret rating?
A. It would certainly
indicate that this particular number
has a secret rating.
Q. Just above his signature
at the bottom of the document,
again ----
A. We have the same file
number, yes.
Q. We have a similar file
number, again with just the letter
G. So the whole thing they are talking and
writing about
is only G Geheim?
A. Yes.
Q. Would you be adventurous
enough to hang a hypothesis on a
document like that, or would you want to couch
your
hypothesis in the most guarded language and say
this might
quite possibly refer to the killing operations, on
the
other hand the document contains no specific
reference?
Would that be the way you would write it as a
cautious
historian?
A. I would say that it has a
reference to the work of the
Einsatzgruppen, and that we should interpret this
as
referring to all of the activities of the
Einsatzgruppen.
Because we have seen the reports, we know that
includes
killing, but someone looking at this letter from
the
outside would not know that.
Q. Yes. Have you any reason
to believe that Hitler was shown
photographs of the killing operations?
. P-92
A. I do not know.
Q. Were there placards
connected with the killing operations
saying, you are to assemble at such and such a
place?
A. There were such placards
put up, yes.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you give me an idea? It
is really the
scale of the thing. These Einsatzgruppen at this
time,
because we are talking about August 41, you may
not be
able to answer this, what proportion of their
duties did
shooting people occupy?
A. As of August 1 they would
be just going into the
transition of killing adult male Jews of
particularly
potential leadership classes, towards a policy of
systematic extermination. So at this point, if I
can use
that unfortunate phrase, the body count would
still be
lower than the documents that come from the fall
of 1941.
The Jager, report for instance, shows August 15 as
the
astronomical jump from selected killing to massive
killing
of women and children. We have another letter
from
Lithuania, it is not part of this file, that says
at
August 7th they are shooting all Jews. So this is
preceding that point by just a few days.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: So, in a way, that is
equivocal. It could
mean from the date of this letter the information
is
necessarily going to include details of the
numbers shot
because the extermination programme is being
accelerated?
A. That would be an
interpretation we placed on it, based on
. P-93
our inferences from the point of time, the
chronology, a
possible interpretation.
Q. Yes. The opposite
contention would be they have not
actually been spending a huge amount of time doing
these
awful shootings?
A. Most of the shootings are
reported in the hundreds at this
point as opposed to the thousands and hundreds of
thousands.
Q. So it is equivocal?
MR IRVING: Not only that. I think that
Professor Browning is
right. I believe the first intercepts were mid
August
onwards, were they not, when they began reporting
30,000
shot?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is what he said.
MR IRVING: I draw Professor Browning's
attention once more to
the subject line of that document. The document
is only
concerning provision of visual materials?
A. Yes, but the reason for
the procurement of visual
materials is to supplement the fact that the
Fuhrer is
receiving regular reports. So we learn from a
particular
document about the procurement of visual
materials, an
existing policy of Hitler receiving current
reports.
Q. Can you -- I am not an
expert on the
Reichssicherheitshauptamt and I am not sure how
much are
you, but can you draw any conclusions from the
desk
number, shall we say, it is (iv), that was the
Gestapo?
. P-94
A. Yes.
Q. Then we have A1. Now,
Eichmann was A something was he
not?
A. It changes over time. At
one point I think it is 4B4,
that is the most common designation.
Q. That is right. Eichmann
was 4B4. So what would 4A1 be?
Have you any idea?
A. My guess is that it is the
secretary, the administrative
centre. This would be his own personal office. I
do not
have an office plan. One could find that out with
an
office plan.
Q. A logical question arises
from this document. Have you
anywhere in any of the archives in which you have
worked
seen any documents generated by this request,
either
incoming to Muller from the Eastern Front or going
from
Berlin to Hitler in consequence of this?
A. I have not seen any
collections of photos that are marked
as in reference to our order of August 1, these
should be
sent to the Fuhrer. I have not seen such a thing.
Q. Are there any collections
of documents or placards or
things relating to shootings on the Eastern Front
that
were sent to Hitler?
A. I do not ----
Q. Either demonstrably or
otherwise in connection with this
order?
A. I do not know of any
evidence of particular photos or
. P-95
placards that were sent.
Q. How many such reports on
the work of the Einsatzgruppen
were actually sent to Hitler that we know of?
A. We do not know.
Q. Have we seen any at all in
the archives?
A. We have seen various ones
that are sent to different
places but none of them are marked as a copy that
was sent
to the Fuhrer's headquarters or whatever, no.
Q. Apart from the famous
Meldung number 51?
A. Yes.
Q. Of December 1942?
A. Yes.
Q. Which we will come to in
chronological sequence. My Lord,
do you have any further questions on that August
1st
document? It is quite important.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. I think you have dealt
with it very
thoroughly.
A. Can I add something?
MR RAMPTON: Yes of course.
A. This is an example of a
document that was available in the
West fairly early. Gerald Fleming quotes it in
his book
which was published I guess in 1982. It is found
in the
Zentralstelle. This is when they got there. They
sent
the copy to the Institute. The copy he cites here
is the
copy in the Bundeschei. So there are at least
three
copies of this in Germany.
. P-96
MR IRVING: Professor, would you agree that it
is difficult to
form an opinion just on a loose sheet of paper
like this?
You want to see the file it is in, is that
correct?
A. We would always prefer to
see the whole file. I do not
turn my back on an individual document because it
is not
everything that I would wish.
Q. Would you also agree that,
when you see a document like
that, you should not jump up and down and say,
Eureka,
this is the philosopher's stone I have been
looking for.
A. I would be cautious not to
yell Eureka, yes.
Q. So historians in this
respect are somewhat different from
leading counsel, would you suspect?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, Mr Irving. Next question.
MR IRVING: On the question of the body count
figures, because
of course I am very concerned about the totals
that are
contained in these documents, is there any paper
trail
leading to the figures, or are these figures --
which
figures are credible because we have seen the
supporting
paperwork that went into them?
A. We have, for instance, the
Jager report that goes in a
sense from one Einsatzkommando to Stahlecker and
then we
have Stahlecker's reports, so we do have the
building
block there. We do not have a lot of what we
would call
the lower level papers from the Einsatzkommandos.
We have
some of the documents from the Gendarme Marie,
such as the
Brestotoft document that we have looked at.
. P-97
Q. How confident can we be
that every time one of these
reports refers to so many thousand Jews being
killed they
are actually Jews who are being killed?
A. We have enough cases in
which I think other evidence can
corroborate that I am fairly confident. That is
not in
exact numbers but that there was a policy to carry
out
large executions, and that these are not numbers
that are
wildly off, or that they are being faked, in the
sense of
they are not being real executions being under
way.
Q. Was there not a tendency
among the Nazis just to lump all
the people that are killed together as Jews,
knowing that
this kind of report would be particularly welcomed
by the
authorities in Berlin?
A. The Jager report shows
that he was very careful in fact to
identify Jewish men, Jewish women and children,
and then
other categories. A number of the Einsatzgruppen
reports
at different times, not in the global figures but
for,
say, summarizing the past two weeks, we will break
down,
so many saboteurs, so many communist
functionaries, so
many mentally ill and so many Jews. The tendency
seems to
be, at least on some occasions, to indicate that
they are
being fairly careful about separating and keeping track of
their victims by category.

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